Anyway.

Watermarking is only mildly sinister, really. Its not an active executable of any kind that would reach out into the Internet and phone home. It is something that, once the music company downloads the file from PirateBay, they would be able to tell which service sold it. It contains absolutely no ability to tell the company what computers it stopped by along the way, or even who downloaded it in the first place. Its the Diet Coke of RIAA evil.

Besides… suppose that the watermark truly is outside of the audible human range. That makes it pretty friggin easy to kill off, don’t you think? Re-encode it and strip off anything outside the human range of hearing… Not only would it get rid of the watermark, it would make a smaller file with virtually no loss in quality. Wait, thats one of the things MP3 encoding ALREADY does… So “professional” pirates would likely do get rid of the watermark before it even hits the torrents.

They could defeat this by having something audible but nigh-innocuous, but there would be WAY too many audiophiles bitching about how they were sold “defective” music, which is basically true.

Its still a step in the right direction, I think.

Basically, he sounds like a pretentious jackass that wants his own personal internet, and not to “keep the riff-raff out” but he’s trying to turn the Internet into a “commercial-only” enterprise, whereupon those who have the cash control the content, rather than content being freely distributable. Basically, he’s bitching that people doing better stuff than him for free is causing him problems.

I mean I got pissed at Buckley for being a dick to his fans, so how do you think I feel about a guy saying the internet is killing art and should be stopped?